Nicholas Barry

When my boss and I sat down with Marco* to talk to him about his performance, he didn’t meet our eyes. His shoulders drooped, and he slumped in his chair. After eight months on the job, we told him, he still required intensive hand-holding on simple tasks, even tasks he had been shown before. Steve, one of the most outstanding interns we have ever had, spent much of his time walking Marco through tasks. We felt that it was time for Marco to move on to other opportunities. We talked it over with him, and at the end of the meeting he slunk quietly out of the room.

Even though I was frustrated at the amount of attention Marco required, it was tough for me to fire him. I could see how dispirited he was. While being fired from a paid job has a bigger impact on your finances, being fired from a volunteer position carries a special kind of humiliation: it’s embarrassing to be told that your help isn’t wanted, even for free. Knowing how it makes the intern feel is what makes it so unpleasant for me.

“You can’t fire an intern.” Daniel, a friend of mine, told me. “They’re working for free!” He wasn’t joking. This is an attitude I’ve heard more than once, but I didn’t expect to hear it from Daniel, who manages employees in his job. It usually comes from people who don’t have experience managing, and who seem to view internships as a form of charity. I believe differently. The strength of our internship program is that we treat interns like employees. We give them real responsibility, allow them to work on real projects, and expect real work from them. We never ask them to make coffee or put quarters in parking meters. That means we need to fire interns who aren’t doing well in our office. But that doesn’t make it easy.

Steve and I spent hours training Marco. As a manager, my primary duty is to empower the interns to do meaningful, useful work for our office, and it’s hard for me to reverse direction on an intern. Up to the moment I fired Marco, I was trying to help him. Once I fire him, I’m shunting him out of our office. I don’t agree with my friend Daniel, but I completely understand the emotions that drive that belief.

I reason with myself that I can only do so much for an intern – Marco needs to reach a certain threshold of performance, or our internship program isn’t sustainable. I’m willing to invest time and effort in an intern, but the investment has to pay off at some point. With Marco, it didn’t.

Everything is all my fault. At least, that's my attitude when it comes to management. If my subordinates aren't performing well, it's probably because I'm not managing them well enough.

How would you feel if every time you completed an assignment for your boss, your boss tore up your work after you finished it? Even if you got paid well, it's hard to imagine that you'd want to keep working at that job.

Well, it turns out that if you don't get recognition for your work, that's almost as demotivating, according to an experiment carried out by Dan Ariely. Experiment subjects are asked to complete a relatively meaningless task. They earn money each time they do the task, and the amount awarded decreases each time they do the task. The question is, when will they get tired of repeating the task?

With one group of subjects, the experimenter asks subjects to write their name on the top of each of their papers, and gives an approving nod upon completing each task.

With another group of subjects, the experimenter puts each assignment on a tall stack of papers without looking at the assignment.

With the final group of subjects, the experimenter takes each assignment as it's completed and shreds it in front of the subjects' eyes.

It turns out that the second group (the "ignored" group) barely completes more work than the third ("shredded") group. So as a boss, ignoring your subordinates' work is almost as bad as actively destroying it, at least in terms of motivation and productivity!

I'm in the middle of introducing a series of new ways to give interns more recognition for their good work. And what fun would a bunch of carrots be without a little bit of the stick? How should I put it? There will be some mild disincentives to unproductivity. There, that sounds suitably benign.

(I'll document all my carrots and sticks on my Work page, along with commentary on how they've worked out so far.)

Carrots and Sticks

I'm recognizing interns' work by doing the following:

When they write response letters to constituents, sometimes the constituents reply appreciatively. I'm beginning to forward those responses to the interns who wrote the letter.

I'm asking interns to prepare reports for our weekly staff meeting, even if the interns' schedules don't match with the meeting, so they'll know their work is being reported to my boss, and to my boss' boss.

I'm preparing a whiteboard with every intern's name, and some major accomplishment from the past week. This is also a mild stick - interns won't want their name to have a big blank space next to it.

I'll make a public list of interns interns who consistently do their work in a timely manner, and will keep a separate list for interns who have fallen behind significantly.

We'll post to our Davis Dollars Facebook page about interns' major accomplishments, and tag them in the post, so it will show up in their news feeds.

Soon I hope to ask interns to prepare a "portfolio" of their concrete accomplishments, which they can list on their resumes, and which I'll talk about when future potential employers contact me about interns' performance.

I'm also making it easier for interns to see how they're doing on old tasks by giving them access to my master list of intern tasks. Up until now, they've been responsible for keeping track of their tasks, and they often let some assignments slip through the cracks. I had to do a lot of reminding to get them to follow up on old tasks. Now the responsibility is in their hands to check up on their old tasks, and they'll be rewarded for doing so!

What are some ways you encourage your peers or subordinates to do well, or discourage them from doing poorly?

After our bumper crop of summer interns, I'm having trouble adjusting to the quieter office. The biggest thing I'm missing, though, is the energy of the intern team.

I think the energy came not only from how full the office was, but also from one intern in particular, Dao, who brought a lot of excitement to everything she did. Now that she's gone, I'm forced to think hard about how to create that level of energy for other interns, without the gift of an unusually buoyant intern around the office every day.

And I'm finding that I also need to focus some on professionalism, for two reasons: (1) In the absence of energy and excitement, some interns don't engage with the work (translation: they don't work as hard); and (2) in the absence of a sense of professionalism and hard work here in the office, it's hard to get the interns excited about the work. If they see others slacking off, they (justifiably) get the idea that it isn't important to work hard here.

So here's what I'm starting to do, as of tomorrow:

Ask interns to be on time. Because they're unpaid, I have been lenient about when interns arrive, but I'm going to start asking interns to be on time. I'll talk to interns gently about adjusting their schedules if they're not able to make it in by the time they have committed to.

Start work earlier myself. I get to work before we start, and I want to make sure I set the right example.

Wander around the office more and talk to interns about what they're working. I do this already, but I should do it more, so interns know I care what they're up to.

Put interns in teams more often. Some interns already work together on projects, but I need to make more of an effort to ask them to work together.

Encourage interns to work on team activities in our main office. We have several rooms in our office, and most of the interns work in the main office with me. Centralizing more of the activity here will allow other all the interns to benefit from each other's energy on projects.

Suggest that interns get lunch together. Some interns already get lunch together, but others are shy or haven't connected much with others in the office. Lunch is an important morale-builder!

Tomorrow, the beginning of our Crowd Wisdom program, will be another experiment in giving responsibility and power our Steinberg interns. We'll get together in the morning to share ideas on whatever topics the interns want to talk about.

The question I have needed an answer to for a long time is this: How can I help interns be productive and energetic at the beginning of the day? Our interns are great, and we already have a strong working environment, but the mornings usually seem to start off just a little bit slowly.

I keep a long mental list of problems, issues, and concerns, and I'm always on the lookout for solutions. (I suspect most managers and teachers do this.) I recently read a terrific article in The Atlantic entitled What Makes a Great Teacher?. The story is largely about Teach for America's efforts to discover what makes great teachers so great. They identify practices like walking around the classroom (instead of staying glued to the chalkboard) and having an established routine for each day, so students know exactly what they'll be doing next.

It immediately struck me that many of these insights are easily applicable to management. One of the practices that interested me was writing a Problem of the Day on the chalkboard every morning, and students who come in get right to work on the problem. Could I do something like this at work?

Interns often have great ideas that I'd like to flesh out some. Mark Averell, for example, suggested an internal website that would aggregate Sacramento- and Capitol-related news sources, tweets, legislative hearings, and district events. After he built it, he asked me for ideas of other resources he could add to the site to make it useful for interns. Other interns working on projects hit roadblocks, and come to me for ideas to get around the obstacle. I can make suggestions, but I would rather tap into the creativity and intelligence of all the interns in the office.

So, Crowd Wisdom! Each morning we'll get together to solve problems and share ideas for doing things. I've created with a list of things to discuss, and each intern can vote for the things they want to talk about most. Each intern has 5 votes, which they can allocate however they like between topics. Interns can add topics that they think other interns would like to talk about.

What will prevent this from becoming a traditional, energy-sapping meeting, or an artificial "motivational" pep-talk? Well, meetings in our office have never been the soul-numbing affairs they seem to be in other offices. We all seem to enjoy our meetings as opportunities to share what we've all been working on. This probably has something to do with the fact that my boss doesn't use meetings as an opportunity to lecture the rest of us - our meetings are used for sharing information and ideas. We'll use Crowd Wisdom get-togethers the same way.

We'll only meet for 10-15 minutes, and we'll focus on exercising creativity and taking action. Interns in our office are already excited about work (interns often ask if they can come in more often than they're currently scheduled), so I'm not worried about it becoming an artificial event. I think this sort of program wouldn't work if they weren't already motivated.

But I think the biggest reason I'm confident Crowd Wisdom will be a success is that it's another opportunity for interns to exercise their creativity and initiative. This event isn't about me; it's about the interns and their work. They'll choose what we talk about.

This will also solve another problem I've been having - I can't keep interns' to-do lists stocked, because they work too quickly! Mornings are especially dry, because it takes me a little while to pull together new tasks. Interns currently jump into working on their Ownership Initiatives, but this will give them the opportunity to work on something else in the morning in case their Initiative is on hold for some reason. Beyond this, it will also create a get-'em-started atmosphere in the morning as we convene around a shared problem to solve. This is as much about creating team spirit as it is about providing tasks for eager interns.

I'll post updates as Crowd Wisdom develops and evolves. Share in the comments if you have some regular form of morning check-in with your colleagues or subordinates to get things started in

Changes are taking place quickly here in the internship program! These are actually updates from a month ago, but things have been so fast-paced that I haven't had time to write about them until now.

I used to be concerned about starting up intern mentoring (as I've mentioned before). The intern retreat we held convinced me that senior interns actually wanted to be relied on as experts. I was still worried that setting up interns to mentor each other might be logistically difficult.

Well, I should have trusted more in the skills of my intern crew. When Ryan started up in early June, I told him to ask Mark and Jeysree (two senior interns) questions. Both of them were extremely helpful in getting him started. Besides saving me work, this had two unexpected benefits: I got to see how other interns did tasks (which allowed me to make corrections), and it built morale between the interns.

Our first completely intern-planned ownership initiative was completed, as well! Jeysree and Mark carried out the first of the Community Office Hours successfully. Now that Mark and Jeysree will both be gone from the office, I'll have my first practice transitioning a project to a new set of interns.

Last month I also started Jeysree on our first official Learning Project. The idea of the Learning Projects is that we will offer interns specific skills to learn, and assign them a project (e.g., an ownership initiative) that will force them to practice this skill. The ultimate goal is for them to become proficient at a new skill.

Jeysree was working with the Prezi presentation platform (prezi.com). I haven't quite figured out a way to integrate learning projects, though - they sit a bit uncomfortably alongside the ownership initiative structure. Ideally they would mesh, but I'm having trouble finding ways to work them together. Perhaps I need to spend more time matchmaking between interns, skills they'd like to learn, and projects that could benefit from those skills.

The success of the learning projects idea may depend on whether interns are more attracted to a project because of the skills it will offer them, because of the project itself, or because of the people already working on the project. If the latter two are strong attractors, I may need to focus on assigning learning projects to interns already on projects, rather than trying to match interns based on skills they want to learn.

I just calculated interns' hours as full-time equivalent (FTE) employees. If you're not familiar with this, it means adding up all their hours per week and dividing by 40 (for a 40-hour work week), which can give you the equivalent number of full-time employees. So we have 16 interns right now, but only two are genuinely full time. All their hours together come to 4.78 FTE interns! I think it will be closer to 6 during July.

My interns, apparently, aren't as wild about initiative as I thought they'd be. It turns out they want a bit more structure.

We recently had an Intern Retreat - we got all the interns together to talk about how things were going, and to ask them to suggest improvements. A few quick findings:

Everyone seems to really like the program - they had plenty of improvements to suggest, but hardly any complaints. I'm always open to complaints, so I don't think they were just biting their tongues out of fear.

Interns like the freedom they're given to dream up their own projects, but also really want some preapproved projects to choose from if they just want to get started on something.

Experienced interns really wanted more opportunities to act as leaders and help mentor newer interns. I've been wanting to start a mentoring program for a while, but feared that the older interns would view it as a hassle. Au contraire!

I'll write another post soon about the intern mentoring I've started up. I have also begun an Internships page of this website to describe what I've learned about starting and running an internship program. For now, I'll start with my biggest surprise, which was that most interns seemed to want more vetted projects.

When I dreamed up the idea of ownership initiatives, I thought the biggest appeal would be that interns could think up their own projects. One of the aspects of my job that I've always valued the most has been the freedom to initiate a project I thought would benefit the office, and I imagined interns would clamor at the opportunity to do the same. So I developed the ownership initiatives around the idea that interns would propose an idea, then investigate how to turn that idea into a feasible project.

Well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that things don't always go as smoothly as I imagined. There are at least three things that stand in the way of my idealized vision:

Many interns - even motivated, creative interns - don't come in with a good understanding of what sorts of projects our office will want to take on.

Roadblocks, often completely unexpected, can derail good ideas, which is frustrating for interns.

Most of our interns are energetic and don't want to spend weeks investigating a potential project before getting started - they want to get started now.

What interns need is a pool of vetted projects they can get started on immediately, which have been cleared of roadblocks, and which I know will further the cause of our office (providing assistance to constituents, and providing a communication channel between constituents and Senator Steinberg).

The ownership initiatives now have a slightly different focus. Instead of trumpeting the benefits of being able to work on projects that interns can design on their own, we emphasize the appeal of having ownership (responsibility and commitment) over a project. We help new interns find places on existing projects. I spend time making sure projects aren't getting stuck. What I still need to implement is a list of fully-vetted projects with notes on how to get started.

Beyond that, I talk to interns about ideas they may want to pursue on their own. I know that there are interns who want to design projects of their own, and I want to make that possible. But I also realize that not everyone wants to invent a completely new program; they just want the opportunity to contribute something of value for which they will be recognized.

Being effective and accountable requires that you be able to control your environment, and this sometimes means you have to manage your peers (or your boss) to make sure you get what you need.

I'm fortunate because my peers are all responsible, talented people who do good work. I know I can rely on them. Despite this, I still sometimes need to manage them a little bit to make sure I can deliver on my commitments. They manage me a bit, as well, if I haven't gotten back to them about something they need.

For example, I keep very good track of which response letters I've sent to Karen for review. If I haven't heard back on something for several days, I'll drop in her office and check up on it. I tell my interns to do the same thing with me - if they haven't heard back about a letter they sent to me, they should ask me what's going on with it, to make sure I haven't misplaced it or forgotten it.

The important thing, in my mind, is to keep track of what you depend on others for (whether those "others" are your subordinates, colleagues, or bosses). Hold them accountable to what they have committed to delivering to you. Do it in a friendly way, but let them know that you rely on them to accomplish your own tasks on time.

I'm really having a lot of fun managing the interns, both for Davis Dollars and in Senator Steinberg's office. Especially at work, I'm building what I think will be a really strong internship program that will be able to accomplish a lot - not just getting our job duties done, but making big changes in Sacramento. My feeling is that I'm really on to something big - I can't do the concept justice in a few brief lines here, but the critical elements are:

Leadership training for everyone; a network structure in which people lead people below them, and train them to be leaders

An open organizational structure in which everyone (or nearly everyone) interfaces with the outside world, thus maximizing potential impact

A flat, decentralized hierarchy in which people and sections of the network can experiment with interesting ideas

I'll write more about these in future posts. I've heard a lot about the last one in articles and books, but I have almost never come across the first two in my readings. I got the idea for the open organizational structure from a really interesting book by a sociologist, Rodney Stark, called The Rise of Christianity, explaining the extremely fast growth of Christianity in the early centuries after Christ's death. He cites the importance of a fast-growing religion maintaining itself as an open network, where each node (person) is actively trying to convert new people. Mormonism, he observes, is growing at the same rate that early Christianity was growing (40% growth per decade). The application of this to my internship program is not, of course, to convert people to some sort of religion - the general idea is that an open network can reach a lot of people, and influence behavior and spread ideas. Lots of social movements and grassroots campaigns do the same thing - they encourage volunteers and members to continue trying to bring new people on board. My hope is that our internship program will be able to recruit allies outside our office to work on projects in the community.

I once heard a story about a plant manager in a World War II airplane factory who radically increased his employees' production. The factory operated around the clock in three eight-hour shifts, and he achieved the improvement by writing on the wall the number of airplane engines completed by the previous shift. Each shift wanted to beat the previous shift's performance, and they worked harder to make that happen.

Whether the story is true, I don't know. But it illustrates an important point - that people want to do well, and it helps to show them how they're doing, and give them something to work toward. I personally believe that the competitive element is useful, but not necessary, for this point.

I heard this concept described another way recently. I was listening to a podcast about activism (I think on the excellent Big Vision Podcast, by Britt Bravo). The guest explained that people are often apathetic because they feel that their efforts are just a drop in the bucket. She said that drops can fill a bucket pretty fast, though. What's important is being able to see the bucket, and see all the other drops from other people, so we know we're making progress.

So the important thing is to provide some context, and show people what other people are working on, so you know you're not the only one working on something.

It was with this in mind that I printed a graph of our progress with our response letter backlog. My intern team does a great job of writing letters, but I think the seemingly-endless assignment of response letters must wear down on some of them. To use the metaphor from above, I wanted to make the bucket more visible by showing how many responses we had left. We have been making steady progress through our backlog, so I figured showing our team how we're doing would give everyone a bit of hope - we are doing well, and we're almost done!

I printed out a graph and showed it to the three interns in today, and asked them all to think about how we're going respond to everyone. I explained that I would show the latest graph every day to keep people aware of where we stood. I had expected a few more letters to come in, but was surprised to have nine letters in my inbox in the next half hour! What an effect!

We'll see whether this sort of effect is sustained over the long run, or if it is only a short-term boost that only occurs the first time I show someone the graph. But I have hope that it will really help give people an understanding of where we are, and remind people to focus on what they can do to help us get to our final destination.